Hotline Sort: The Welfare Wars

By Julie Sobel

5) Crossroads GPS is launching a $7.2 million ad blitz Wednesday in five key Senate races: Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Nevada, and Virginia.
4) Two tough new ads in the presidential race:
Mitt Romney and the RNC are up with a commercial saying President Obama "quietly announced a plan to gut welfare reform by dropping work requirements." The Romney campaign believes Obama is vulnerable on the welfare issue -- Newt Gingrich famously called him the "food stamp president" during the campaign -- so expect to hear this line of attack more on the campaign trail.
Priorities USA has a new brutal ad featuring a former employee at GST Steel, who talks about losing his job and health benefits -- and his wife's illness -- after Bain Capital closed the steel plant.
3) The New York Times highlights single women as potential swing voters this year. The Times:

In an election focused on the economy, single women present a complicated case. They already earn less than married people and single men, and they have not fared well during the Obama administration. They have had a harder time than married women paying rent, getting medical care and finding jobs. While the jobless rate for married women has stayed relatively low, at 5.6 percent compared with 2.6 percent before the recession, the rate for unmarried women has risen to 11 percent, from a prerecession level of 6 percent.
Still, polling and focus groups show that single women are reluctant to blame Mr. Obama for their economic woes and tend to approve of a greater role for government in crises. Their reliance on programs like welfare, food stamps and Medicaid has grown significantly since 2007. In 2010, 55 percent of their households got some form of assistance, not counting school lunches, compared with 18 percent of married women's households.